XGeneration 1: You Don't Know Me (21 page)

“I’m not sure how I feel.” She turned to Margaret. “I probably just need more time.”

“Well, there’s no hurry. No need to rush anything.” Margaret snapped off the headlights and killed the engine. “Just look at me and Kevin. We started dating as freshmen, too.”

In the darkness, Janis rolled her eyes.

“If you ever have any questions, you can talk to one or both of us.” Margaret unbuckled her seat belt and looked at Janis with a maternal tuck of her chin. “I mean it.”

Janis thanked her dryly as she got out of the car. At the top of her street and across Twenty-first Avenue sat the Spruels’ house, a single-story white brick home like theirs, but with navy blue instead of coffee brown trim. The light was on in Scott’s bedroom, and Janis caught her gaze lingering on the solitary glow as she followed Margaret up to the front porch.

While Margaret dug inside her purse for her keys, Tiger trotted up and began sideswiping Janis’s legs with her body. The cat looked at her with dilated pupils, her meow ending in a question mark.

Janis stooped to scratch her behind the ears. “I’m going to stay out and pet Tiger a few minutes.”

“All right.” Margaret found the key. “Just remember to lock the door when you come in.”

Janis waited for the front door to click closed before making her way back down the semi-circular driveway, Tiger padding behind her. When Janis reached the street, she looked toward Scott’s house again. Tiger mewled and pushed her head against Janis’s calf, no doubt wondering where her ear-scratcher had gone. Janis sat on the curb and let Tiger hop onto her lap.

Her and Scott’ conversation had begun normally enough. But when she looked at his face, she remembered her childhood in the woods. Or more precisely, she remembered she’d been thinking about it that week—a lot. The woods had been her refuge from the adult world. There was no one inside them to scold or shame her, telling her it’s “this not that” or “that not this.” No hydrogen bombs, no arms race, no Mutually Assured Destruction. No one hinting about her responsibilities in a future whose very existence looked doubtful to begin with.

The world beyond the cul-de-sac had belonged to them, and they to that world. It seemed funny to her that she’d tried to explain those feelings to Scott, that she’d opened up to him—and funnier still that he’d seemed to understand.

Janis looked down at Tiger, who was gouging her knees contentedly. Janis stroked her purring body and shifted her attention back to Scott’s house. All year, she had barely recognized him as the same person. He was taller, neater, more appearance conscious, it seemed. Yet his eyes hadn’t changed. She had realized that only tonight, seeing him up close. Yes, beyond the lenses were the same questioning eyes she remembered from when they used to play in the woods together.

And that’s where things had really gone cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs because without warning, she’d been in the woods again. Not just remembering being there, but
actually
there. She was a kid—eight, probably—on the summer day she and Scott had crossed the big tree and tried to venture to the end of The Meadows.

She had screamed when the dog came out of nowhere and charged them. She never used to scream—thought it was for a sissier class of girl—but the sudden appearance of the Rottweiler, huge and ferocious, had wrenched the piercing cry from her chest. Janis remembered looking at the twin rust-colored spots at its clenched brow because to look into its eyes or its mouth of bared teeth was too much. She would have screamed again. She squeezed Scott’s shoulders, who eased them back, eased them away, his stick held out in front of them. And then Britt whistled from the steps, and the woods and the dog vanished, the room oscillating back into being. She found herself on the couch, Scott beside her, holding her hand. Had she passed out? Had he been trying to revive her? But as her head had cleared, as the room stilled and sharpened around her, he seemed as startled as she was.

Gazing on his window, she wondered if something similar had happened to him.

A god of doorways,
Mrs. Fern had said.
One face looking to the past. The other peering ahead, to the future.

Janis thought about that. All week at tryouts, she had been seeing ghostlike images of soccer balls in motion. They were faint and fleeting, but they gave her just enough time to react, to position herself. Wasn’t that peering into the future? She hadn’t thought about it in that way, but wasn’t it? And then this experience of the past—not just peering there but going there,
being
there.

And had she taken Scott with her, somehow?

Tiger protested when Janis went to set her aside, clinging gamely to her pantyhose before realizing it was a losing battle. Janis stood, brushed the lap of her dress, and began walking up the street. Her flats beat a quick rhythm against the asphalt. She glanced back toward her front door. She had five minutes, maybe, but she needed to talk to Scott, needed to ask him. As crazy as it would sound, she had to know if he’d gone back to the summer of 1978, too—back to the woods of their childhood.

She was nearly to the top of her hill when Scott’s window went dark. For a moment, Janis stared at the glinting of the street light against the panes, surprised at the weight of her disappointment.

You can always ask him on Monday.
But would she?

She turned to walk home. The shadow of the Leonards’ second story rose through the trees in her leftward periphery. She sped her clacking pace as a breeze rustled the leaves. Janis rubbed her bare arms, feeling the cool of the fall night for the first time. And then she caught a whiff of smoke, faint but unmistakable.
Could be anyone’s,
she told herself. She fixed her gaze on the yellow light of her front porch. Tiger met her at the driveway and accompanied her the rest of the way.

Janis reached the front door a little out of breath, shaking her head at her own paranoia. She opened the door a crack and automatically positioned her legs to block Tiger from trying to squeeze past, but the cat wasn’t beside her. Janis turned to find her at the foot of the steps, a low murmur caught in her throat. She was peering toward the side yard, ears perked.

Probably hears another cat—

The smell of cigarette smoke breezed past again, stronger this time.

Janis patted her thigh for Tiger, let her inside the house, and then hurried to lock the door behind them.

Leaning against the jamb, Janis began to shiver. She didn’t need any special abilities to know that for the duration she’d been outside, Mr. Leonard had been watching.

17

Scott stood in his bedroom, his rumpled shirt untucked, one finger hooked over the knot of his tie, staring at artifacts of an earlier hope. The rag and polish he had used to burnish his loafers lay beside his bed; the ironing board where he had pressed his shirt, its legs now folded in, leaned against his closet door; the dark-green bottle of cologne sat on his dresser, its cap still off. Only a few hours old, the ambitions they represented already felt forever out of his reach.

He yanked the pink knit tie from his neck and cast it away.

I told you.
The voice again.

“Shut it.”

It’s not your place, Scott-o. Not your people. What did you expect? Your place isn’t with them. It’s
above
them. You know that. You know the powers you possess.

Scott didn’t fight the voice this time. Instead, he found himself considering his desk. He had dusted and wiped it down with Pledge during the Big Clean, as he thought of it. Now it held his school books and some folders. But looking at it, he could think only of what wasn’t there, what was missing.

He flicked off the light switch, and the room fell dark. The street light shone against his blinds. The Prelude had turned down the street ten minutes before. He’d heard its signature from the family room, where his father had wanted him to watch the end of
Sudden Impact
(and Scott, feeling too miserable and defeated to say no, had sagged onto the couch). But now, like a desperate flicker, he felt his old hope pleading for a peek outside.

Just a single peek to see if maybe she—

Forget it, Romeo.

“Yeah,” he muttered. “Forget it.”

He left his room and walked down the hallway, through the blue glow of a television now silent, and past the bass snores of his father. He stopped in the kitchen for the cordless phone, slipping it into his back pocket.

In the garage, he moved the folding card table and the stack of empty boxes hiding his access way. He followed the tunnel through his father’s hoard to the storage room, the crowded space smelling of sawdust and soldered metal. An aluminum-tipped string dangled from a single bulb. Scott jerked it. A long workbench appeared beneath a line of power outlets and a crumbling pegboard that had once held tools. Scott squatted in front of the cabinets. He pulled away concealing boxes and crumpled balls of newspaper and, one by one, stood with his pieces of equipment, setting them across the workbench: TRS-80, DC1 modem, printer, a box of floppies. He emerged with his cables and power strip last.

The next minute was like a familiar dance, something Scott would never blunder, never screw up. He inserted this cord here, that cord there, linking, making connections, enabling communication. With his small network complete, Scott plugged in the power strip and snapped its red switch. He waited a moment, then turned on each device in the proper sequence.

Scott didn’t have a plan. He only wanted to hear the crunching of the disk drive again, the cleansing sweeps of the printer wire. He wanted to see the green display of the monitor welcoming him back, the flashing cursor awaiting his commands. He wanted to see it all returning to life.

And as it did, Scott’s heart pounded with anticipation.

TRS-80 Model III Disk BASIC

© 1980 by Tandy Corp. All Rights Reserved

READY

>

This is where you belong, buddy—in here so you can navigate the greater networks.

Scott reached behind the DC1 modem and drew up the one cable that remained inert. It was the telephone cord, but it hadn’t a receptacle for its plastic head.
Which means you don’t have jack, Jack.
Scott’s face stung at his own joke. Without a phone jack, there was no way to plug in, no means by which to access the globe-spanning networks, to exercise his power. Scott sighed as he looked around the closet-sized workshop. Without a jack, his world was reduced to this.

Unless…

He pushed up his glasses and started searching along the wall. They had moved here in, what, seventy-six, seventy-seven? Back before cordless phones were in use. So if the previous owner was really into his woodwork, or whatever he did back here, he wouldn’t have been able to hear the phone ringing in the house. And maybe his wife got tired of coming out every two minutes to tell him that Jim or Joe or Pope John himself was on the phone. And maybe he got just as tired of going inside. Maybe, just maybe, they had a second line installed.

And there it was, down beside the bench, just above the short length of wood trim that ran along the floor—a basic wall jack. Over the receptacle sat a glob of dried paint that Scott had to pick away, but when he pressed in the modular connector, it clicked sweetly home.

Seconds later, the modem blinked to indicate a connection.

But is it a clean connection?

Scott stooped over the computer, loaded his COMM floppy, and typed out a command to display the number he was dialing from. Within seconds, he had his answer: same exchange as their home phone, but a different line. Did his parents know they were paying for two lines? Scott’s fingers raced over the keys, commanding the modem to dial the number for automated time and weather.

> ATDP3721411

Dialing 3721411

Rapid pulses followed, and in each one, Scott could hear the number: …(3) …….(7) ..(2) .(1) ….(4) .(1) .(1). He held his breath and waited. Then came the ring. But before Mrs. Time could answer his call, Scott punched the three-key command to hang up the modem.

“Damn it!”

He turned and paced the small workshop. Another delay, which meant this line was tapped as well. Any hacking adventures he undertook, whether here or in his room, would be recorded, stored as evidence, and read off to a grand jury one day as part of his indictment proceedings. The muscles between his shoulders tensed, and for a second he pictured himself shoving all his equipment from the workbench to the cement floor. But the anger wasn’t his, not entirely. It came from the part of himself that he’d felt in the library in September when he had gone to print off The Pact. The part of himself that hungered for access and power—that craved it.

And now it was being denied.

But by what? By whom?

Scott rubbed the back of his neck. He had never shared any of his phreaking or hacking exploits on the message boards. He and Wayne had always been ultra careful in that department. And compared to the big names in the hacking-verse, their own exploits had always seemed small town anyway. Until U.S. Army Information, of course, but that had been Scott’s final hack, his last time on the network.

Scott became distracted. At the far wall, he dragged away obstructing boxes, bags of instant cement, and a stack of paint cans. He’d perceived correctly—the wall was a propped up piece of painted plywood. Tipping it out, he managed to maneuver it against the door. The workshop widened by another five feet. He walked inside the new space and stood in the dim light.

The smell of soldered metal was stronger here, and Scott saw why. The space had been a metal workshop. Actually, it still was a metal workshop. A welding bench stood at one end, crowded around with hammers, pliers, a mounted vice, a drill press, cluttered shelving… and was that a lathe? Sheets of metal leaned against it. He supposed his father could have acquired the equipment on one of his discount shopping sprees, but Scott doubted it. The workshop, with its aluminum siding and singed cement floor, appeared to have been used a good deal. The prior owners had just never cleared it out for some reason.